Radical Joy Revealed is a weekly message of inspiration about finding and making beauty in wounded places. We hope you'll enjoy these doorways into places that are both familiar and surprising, and we welcome your suggestions, stories, and photos. Click here to subscribe.

The Return of Sweet Memories

The swimming pool "beach" at Peony Park, Omaha, Nebraska

On the day of the Global Earth Exchange we go to wounded places and make a gift of beauty for them. There are many kinds of wounded places; essentially any place that's not the way it was when we loved it is wounded--to us. For one woman, the wounded place was a park that had been torn down to make a shopping mall. Her ceremony was simple, the effects profound.

Carrying a bouquet of flowers from her garden, Carrie Pandis got out of her car and looked around the enormous parking lot of the mall. She had come to do a Global Earth Exchange, but she had few expectations beyond her determination to confront what had happened to a place she loved.

Peony Park was built in the center of Omaha, Nebraska in 1919 as a family entertainment park. In 1994 it had been razed--every last building, park bench, tree, and ride--and replaced with a strip mall. Ever since, Carrie had been avoiding the place.

In the parking lot the only remnant of natural life in sight was one small tree, looking, she thought, "sad and lonely" in its concrete surroundings. She knew she would not go into the stores, which had nothing to do with Peony Park, but this ground, the air around them--she realized that they contained memory. She began walking around the parking lot, allowing the memories to flow back. She remembered the palatial dance hall, where her father had taught her to foxtrot. She remembered the huge swimming pool, almost like a real lake, with a strip of sandy beach, where she had taken her small son. There was a park with big old shade trees, where her family had gone for picnics and to hear the Omaha Philharmonic play pops concerts on summer nights. In the 1970s an amusement park had opened, and she recalled the night her son and husband arrived home from an outing, the boy toting a huge stuffed dolphin that he had won at a game booth. At the end of all her remembering, Carrie lay her flowers under the lone tree. "I'm really at peace now with Peony Park," she wrote. "I feel that the collective good memories are all still there, hovering in the ether."

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It's time for the
Global Earth Exchange, the day when people all over the world make simple gifts of beauty for the places they love
that have fallen on hard times.

Saturday, June 18--worldwide!

For information & to register

click here.
To discover or join other events forming around the world, see our Listings and Map.

Radical Joy for Hard Times is a global community of people dedicated to finding and making beauty in wounded places. Reconnecting with these places, sharing our stories of loss, and making acts of beauty there, we transform the land, reconnect people and the places that nourish them, and empower ourselves to make a difference in the way we live on Earth.

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